At Baṣrah and at Kûfah the ṣaḥn was the principal feature of the mosque, as indeed it had been at Medînah; this was not the case at Fusṭâṭ. The first Egyptian mosque was built by ‘Amr ibn al-’Âṣ in the year A.D. 642. It stood in the midst of vineyards and consisted merely of a covered place, 50 x 30 cubits in extent (28·92 x 17·34 metres), enclosed in a brick wall.[402] The people assembled in the open space which surrounded it. The roof, which was very low, must have been supported on columns, though these are not mentioned. The brick walls were unplastered, and the floor was strewn with pebbles. ‘Amr set up within it a wooden minbar, but this was resented by ‘Umar, and it was removed. ‘Is it not enough’, wrote the khalif, ‘that thou shouldst stand while the people sit at thy feet?’ This episode is of the highest significance in the history of the minbar. It is clear that it was regarded at that time as a throne rather than as a pulpit, and as such unsuited to any but the khalif. It was not until the close of the Umayyad period that the minbar lost its secular significance and became a part of the ritual furnishing of the mosque. With this change it is probable that its form changed also, and instead of the two steps and a seat of the Prophet’s minbar, the high pulpit of the modern mosque came into use. That this pulpit was copied from the pulpits of Christian churches is not improbable. The minbar which was set up in the time of ‘Abd al-Azîz ibn Marwân (A.D. 685-705) in the mosque of ‘Amr is said to have been taken from a Christian church.[403] Neither was there in ‘Amr’s mosque any miḥrâb to mark the qiblah; it was not until the third enlargement of the mosque in A.D. 710 that the qiblah wall was given a miḥrâb. It is further recorded that the orientation adopted by ‘Amr was imperfect, so that the worshippers were obliged to stand askew that they might face truly towards Mekkah while they prayed. The mosque was provided with six doors, two in each wall, with the exception of the qiblah wall, which was left unbroken. The first enlargement of the building took place in A.D. 673, on which occasion an open space, or court, was added to the north. In the second enlargement (A.D. 698-699) the mosque was entirely rebuilt and the ṣaḥn was included within its walls.
It appears from these accounts that by the middle of the Umayyad period the development from courtyard-house to sanctuary was complete. Its course had been simple and obvious. All the essentials of the stereotyped form were present at Medînah; the differences were differences in size and splendour, not in kind. The domestic court had become the ṣaḥn; the palm-leaf sheltering roofs against the qiblah wall and in one angle of the court had solidified into the riwâqs; the palm-trunk columns had been replaced by columns or piers of brick (possibly by brick columns at Medînah itself as early as the time of ‘Umar), or, where the spoils of Sasanian and Byzantine lay ready to hand, as at Kûfah or Fusṭâṭ, by columns of marble. The qiblah had been given a visible shape in the miḥrâb niche, and by the close of the Umayyad period the minbar had wholly lost its temporal attributes and had taken its place as part of the necessary furniture of the mosque, though it probably still continued to be a movable wooden structure. Such a sanctuary, but reduced to the modest dimensions of a private chapel (if I may be permitted the phrase), is the mosque of Ukhaiḍir. The fact that its orientation is inexact—Mekkah lies to the south-east of Ukhaiḍir, whereas the direction indicated by the miḥrâb is almost due south—would not have been regarded as of much importance. As has been mentioned, ‘Amr’s mosque had the same defect, and in this respect Manṣûr’s mosque at Baghdâd offers a yet more significant parallel. Ṭabari observes that the mosque in the round city was not properly oriented because it was built to fit the qaṣr, whereas at Ruṣâfah the orientation was right, because the mosque was built before the qaṣr.[404] Precisely the same explanation applies to the Ukhaiḍir mosque. The palace builders were accustomed to square their plans to the points of the compass, and a miḥrâb in the south wall was the closest approximation which could be obtained in an edifice which lay north and south. The mosque was so small that there was no difficulty in applying to it the system of vaulting which reigns over the whole palace, but the massive Mesopotamian vault was unsuited to free-standing columns and the roof of the riwâqs has fallen. Outside Ukhaiḍir we have no extant example of a vaulted mosque on this plan. We are specifically told that the roof of the mosque at Baṣrah was first of reeds and then of teak; the nature of the roof of the ẓullah at Kûfah is open to doubt. Its ceiling was like the ceiling of Greek churches, a description which does not exclude the possibility of a vault. That the miḥrâb at Ukhaiḍir received no decoration need cause no surprise. Far from being regarded as having any special sanctity, the miḥrâb is defined as the least holy part of the mosque and the Imâm is earnestly warned not to take up his station within it—doubtless, as Professor Becker observes, in order to emphasize the fact that though the miḥrâb was copied from the Christian apse, it shared none of its attributes.[405] Of the minbar it is improbable that any vestige would be found under the ruin heaps at Ukhaiḍir. It was most likely of wood, and has long been destroyed. Nor is it necessary to suppose that the ṣaḥn contained a water-basin for ablutions. No such feature is mentioned in the account of the early mosques, save that at a later date Maqrîzi records the presence in the mosque of ‘Amr of an ancient well appertaining to the gardens in which the mosque was built.[406]
It will be convenient to carry this survey a little further in order to include the mosques of Sâmarrâ, which are not far removed, either chronologically or geographically, from the mosque of Ukhaiḍir, but in so doing the early Syrian and North African mosques must be taken into account. The plan of the first mosques in Syria was partly determined by the fact that they were erected on the site of Christian churches. They differ, therefore, from the normal construction of the Medînah type. To the khalif ‘Umar is ascribed the first Mohammadan building upon the site which is now occupied by the Aqṣâ, but it seems probable that his edifice was nothing but a makeshift reparation of the ruined church of the Virgin.[407] Probably the Umayyad khalif ‘Abd al-Malik rebuilt the mosque in the year A.D. 691, but in A.D. 746 it was destroyed by an earthquake. Manṣûr rebuilt it, and it was again destroyed by earthquake. It was restored by al-Mahdi about A.D. 780, but the plan was considerably altered. Even the mosque described by Muqaddasi in A.D. 985 is materially different from the building which exists to-day. I think it exceedingly doubtful whether the mosque retained at any time after the temporary construction of ‘Umar the plan of Justinian’s church, since the necessary alteration in the orientation must have introduced a wide diversity; but the design of the many-aisled church and the presence of a large quantity of columns and capitals may well have influenced the mosque builders. In any case the position of the Aqṣâ would have led to an abnormal plan, inasmuch as the great court of the ḥaram enclosure, in which it stood, rendered it unnecessary to give a separate court, or ṣaḥn, to the mosque.
The Umayyad mosque at Damascus is also abnormal, but its plan seems to have been far more directly determined than in the Aqṣâ by the building which preceded it on the same site. The nave and aisles of the church of St. John must have dictated the scheme of its arcades, and its distinguishing feature, the wide central aisle running north and south, can only be explained by a similar disposition, either transept or narthex, in the church.[408] It is conceivable that the temple porticoes may have given the impulse to the full development of the riwâqs about the ṣaḥn, just as the porticoes of such buildings as the Serapeion, the agora, and the gymnasium at Alexandria, or of the stoas and agoras which adorned the Hellenistic cities of the Roman empire, may have had their share in suggesting an extension of the colonnades of the mosque, and indeed in Mesopotamia, where these models were absent, there is no reason for supposing that the riwâqs were carried in the first constructions all round the ṣaḥn. But this extension was in itself a not unnatural growth out of the Medînah plan, and in its further history, the courtyard-mosque with its deep ḥaram and its narrow flanking riwâqs pursued its own line of development, based upon its own needs. In this development no doubt the renowned Umayyad mosque at Damascus played a part. In Syria both the Aqṣâ and the mosque at Ba’albek show the wide central aisle running north and south.[409] It is typical of the Tunisian mosques, but here it is almost always found in conjunction with a wide transept running parallel with the qiblah wall; a dome covers the miḥrâb where the wide aisle and the transept meet, and a second dome stands at the opposite end of the central aisle. This ⏊-shaped scheme can be seen at Qairawân, in the Zaitûnah at Tunis, at Tilimsân, and elsewhere. The mosque of Qairawân was founded in A.D. 671, but entirely rebuilt, first in 703 and again in 837.[410] The Zaitûnah was founded in A.D. 732. The great mosque at Cordova, founded at the end of the eighth century, had the same disposition.[411] The Tilimsân mosques are considerably later in date and are built with piers, with the exception of Sidi al-Ḥalwi, where both piers and columns are used.[412]
With the exception of the late Tilimsân group, the wooden roof of all the above-mentioned mosques, both in Syria and in North Africa, was supported by columns and arches, the columns having invariably been taken from pre-Mohammadan buildings. Probably the earliest extant example of a mosque in which the arches rested on piers is at Ḥarrân, but the building is unfortunately so much ruined that its exact disposition cannot be determined without excavation. The plan, so far as it is apparent, has been given by Dr. Preusser.[413] The central arch in the north façade of the ḥaram alone remains standing. Its width would seem to indicate that here, as at Damascus, the central aisle was broader than the rest. On either side of it there was an arch of much narrower span.[414] None of the other piers can be placed with certainty. There are some fragments of columns both in the ḥaram and in the east riwâq. An inscription on the east gate gives the name of Ṣalâḥ al-Dîn,[415] but I think it certain that it alludes not to the foundation, but to the restoration of the mosque. The cusped ornament round the relieving arch over the door corresponds with the cusped motive on the façade of the Mayâfârqîn mosque, and the gateway at Ḥarrân has every appearance of being the work of Ṣalâḥ al-Dîn. But the engaged capitals of the interior responds in the east wall, and the wreathed acanthus capital under the central arch of the ḥaram (one capital only is preserved) must be dated several centuries earlier. I do not doubt that they were executed for the places which they occupy, and I agree with Dr. Herzfeld in assigning them to the Umayyad period.[416] I observed, however, among the ruins in the interior of the mosque many fragments of carved ornament which cannot be earlier than the time of Ṣalâḥ al-Dîn, and I came to the conclusion that until the building has received further study it is impossible to make a more precise statement concerning it than that it seems to be a structure of which parts at least belong to the early eighth century, that it had a wide central aisle and four gable roofs supported on masonry piers, or possibly upon piers and columns.
At Raqqah, according to Balâdhuri,[417] a mosque was built by Sa’îd ibn ‘Âmir ibn Ḥudhaim not long after the conquest of the country by the Mohammadans; and Muqaddasi, as I have already had occasion to mention,[418] speaks of one of the Raqqah mosques as built upon columns. My impression upon visiting the site in 1909 was that the earliest Mohammadan city must have occupied the ground where, among ruin heaps, rises a rectangular minaret. In connexion with this minaret I conjectured that the first mosque had stood (though possibly the minaret was not contemporary with the earliest building), and since the town to which it belonged was the successor of Nicephoricum-Callinicum, and there were no doubt plenty of columns at hand for the mosque, I conclude that it was Sa’îd ibn ‘Âmir’s edifice which was described by Muqaddasi, and that it is to be classed with the normal type of courtyard-mosque built on classical sites, i.e. it had a riwâq or riwâqs composed of columns. The khalif Manṣûr founded in the year A.H. 155 a second town, the ruins of which are still to be seen to the west of the earlier settlement. Upon this site there were no ancient remains,[419] that is to say that Manṣûr had not Roman or Byzantine materials at his disposal. Now within the walls of Manṣûr’s city stand the ruins of a mosque built upon piers ([Fig. 32]). According to an inscription over the central arch of the ḥaram arcade it was repaired in A.D. 1166 by the Atâbek Nûr al-Dîn.[420] It was surrounded by a wall built of sun-dried brick, which was strengthened by rounded towers. The ḥaram was composed of three rows of oblong brick piers, of which the northernmost alone is standing; the riwâqs on the remaining three sides were of two rows of columns which can be traced only by the holes in the ground whence the burnt bricks whereof they were built have been extracted. The central arch of the ḥaram is no wider than the arches on either side, but the niche in which it is set is carried up higher than the other niches, and M. van Berchem has suggested that it may have been surmounted by a gable, like the mosques at Damascus and Diyârbekr. It is possible that this was so, but both at Damascus and at Diyârbekr the central aisle is distinguished from the side aisles by its greater width. The round minaret in the ṣaḥn at Raqqah I believe to have been the work of Nûr al-Dîn. At Baghdâd, Manṣûr built a mosque of which we have nothing but the description. Its walls were of sun-dried brick and its columns of wood, each column being composed of two pieces, the ends bound together with sinews and glue and rings of iron, with the exception of five or six columns near the minaret, which were constructed of rounded pieces of wood.[421]
Fig. 32. Mosque at Raqqah.
Less than a hundred years later Mutawakkil (A.D. 847-861) built the mosque of Abû Dulaf, which is closely related in plan to Manṣûr’s mosque at Raqqah ([Fig. 33]).[422] There is the same enclosing wall of sun-dried brick garnished with